I expect there will be a bit of an adjustment if you’ve played this on PC and are making the transition, but, by the time you’re more on your own, you’ll be an old hand at the new controls.Īt the end of the day, I can say that this is still Star Trek Online. These abilities change-up the battle or mission considerably, so there’s always a reason to take a moment to think of who might offer the best advantages in any given situation.Ī console feels more intuitive to me simply because that’s how I’ve gamed, so I took to the Star Trek Online experience pretty quickly, and Cryptic does a good job of hand-holding you through the first missions. Press their corresponding button, skim the wheel to the desired effect and it happens. These abilities are enhanced by officers at the helm when you have put skill points into those officer’s abilities. When playing, your ship – depending on its class – and the consoles (internal mods) installed, it carries with it special abilities like channeling emergency power to shields or a tachyon beam that eats at an enemy’s shields. Star Trek Online, unlike some other games, seems to make sure you have no shortage of space. Inventory management and equipping the right tool for the right job is definitely as easy as it should be. I could cycle through all my options with a button press and a flick of the controller stick.Ī keyboard is still faster, but this game isn’t so fast-paced that you’re ever in danger of your character or ship dying because of the difference. Wheels everywhere wheels to select both equipment and abilities, and they work effectively. The other problem Cryptic faced when adapting the game to console is how to manage the control schemes from a keyboard, where you have almost infinite options when it comes to slaving complex functions to keys, to a console controller with far more limited options. If I had lost progress or it happened frequently, both would be marks against the game, but I didn’t lose my way and I try to be tolerant of beta runs. Fortunately, the game tracks progress well and I didn’t lose any. I didn’t get any error messages to point to and no other symptoms beyond the fact that nothing worked even though my controller didn’t lose contact with the console. I literally couldn’t move or fire weapons, which left me to be pummeled by the Borg ship until I quit and reloaded. That said, did encounter a time in one of my early tutorial missions that pits your ship against the Borg where I lost all control of the ship. Occasionally, textures can take a moment to load, but, for the most part, things run smoothly. Pauses to load new environments happen when you’d expect it to and load times aren’t oppressive. Maybe it’s a little too big, all things considered, but it does help give the player the sense that they are but a small part of a big universe. Where it seemed like, in the series, crew could barely walk two abreast sometimes, the game corridors have a sense that you could drive your car through them and the bridge of a starship has the size and grandeur that I, as a fan, always thought it should. In fact, my first ship, a Miranda-class I chose to name the USS Franklin – in honor or the latest film – has a larger than life feel that the series have never matched. Overall, everything looks like it should and the environments capture the feel of Star Trek. When in space and not, textures look a little extra smooth and lacking in fine detail, such as with asteroids and ship interiors, but that was somewhere I expected graphical sacrifices to be made. There are no “maximum settings” to be selected when it comes to a console, of course, so Cryptic has to find a balance that builds a universe that runs smoothly while not being such a step down from what’s possible on PC that it feels inferior, and I think they found that balance well. There are, of course, some differences between the console version and the PC version. I can say, after being privileged to take the closed beta for a spin these past few days, I’m looking forward to playing much more this fall. I find playing anything other than strategy games (ideally, turn-based) on a PC awkward and counter-intuitive, so I was excited at the prospect of picking it up again with the announcement that Star Trek Online was going to make the leap to the console space. With some five decades of lore to draw from it’s already a galactic sandbox of sorts that begs to be explored. The reason I quit playing was simply because I’ve been a console gamer for as long as I’ve been a gamer. Indeed, if there were any franchises out there that were ripe to make the leap into the MMO space, it’d be Star Trek. I haven’t played Star Trek Online in several years now, not because I’m not a fan of Trek, or certainly the idea of Trek as an MMO.
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